David Chase is currently in development on Project: MKUltra, a limited series at HBO that will chart the story of a secret mind control program operated by the CIA in the 1950s and ’60s. The show will be Chase’s first series since his groundbreaking hit The Sopranos. But why has it taken the New Jersey native so long to return to the small screen?
“Well, I wrote a lot of things, and nobody bought them,” Chase explained this afternoon during a career Q&A as part of the industry forum at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival.
“I wasn’t that lucky, and that’s the reason why. There was something at HBO I really wanted to do, and then they didn’t want to do it. That fell apart because of money, and then nobody else wanted to do it. After that, we did what they called a prequel to The Sopranos, which is not what I ever thought it was, and that wasn’t successful in the theater; it was successful on television.”
2021’s The Many Saints of Newark is the prequel project Chase refers to, and he told the audience in Karlovy Vary that he initially envisioned the project as only partially an origins story, but “unfortunately that took over the whole process.”
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“I can tell you, we just made a mistake,” he said. “There was the character of Dickie, who was Chris’s father. We had talked about him all through The Sopranos, that he was a drug addict and an alcoholic and insane. And then when we made the movie, he wasn’t in it.”
Chase added: “I don’t know how we forgot that, but we did. The problem was we didn’t want to cross him with Tony Soprano. We thought, well, he looked like the same kind of guy, some kind of rage-filled idiot, so we didn’t do it.”
Chase continued to explain that he had simply been lucky with the circumstances that allowed The Sopranos to be produced without much interference from a studio or network.
“I hadn’t been that lucky before that because I know that I write outside of what they want,” Chase said of networks and studios. “They want everything they’ve seen before. They want things they’ve seen make loads of money before. It’s very simple really. And they want the Oscars and to go to the parties.”
Chase said that he struggled to understand why executives or financiers enter the film business if they’re afraid of creative risk, considering the relatively low margin for profit.
“I’m not a businessman, but the profit margins in the motion picture business have always been around 6%, from the silent era to the present day, so I’m not sure why anyone would get into that business if you’re afraid of taking risks. You’re better off selling running shoes,” he said.
Chase continued to illustrate his point by recalling a quote filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie once gave to the press.
“Christopher McQuarrie wrote The Usual Suspects, and he left the Town for a long time, and he said the whole thing is run by only two things, greed and fear, and he’s absolutely right,” Chase said.
“And so for whatever reason we are going back to greed and fear, I think that’s just the natural state of things.”
Project: MKUltra is based on the non-fiction book Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra by author John Lisle. Chase optioned the book and is writing the adaptation, which falls under the first-look deal his company Riverain Pictures has at HBO.
The story has been described as a “dramatic thriller” and follows the infamous chemist and spymaster Sidney Gottlieb, often known as The Black Sorcerer, who headed the CIA’s MKUltra Psychedelic program, which conducted dangerous and deadly mind control experiments on willing – and unwilling – subjects during the height of the Cold War. Gottlieb is also known as the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture.
When asked why the subject matter was of interest, Chase said: “Well, most likely because I took LSD when I was younger.”
He continued: “I was not an acid head, but I took it eight or nine times, and I believe that it changed my life, and I still don’t quite understand it, and then when you hear that the American government wanted to turn it into a weapon, and how they fucked up, and it’s not a weapon at all, it’s a spiritual experience, that’s a good movie.”
Chase is exploring the subject across a series at HBO and a feature film, which he is currently writing. The feature does not have a distributor attached: “I guess we’re gonna have to make the movie and then try to find one,” Chase said.
The veteran filmmaker continued to say that he originally had no interest in adapting the story for television and only saw the source material as a film.
“I’ve been writing the movie for five years, but the movie is not just about LSD; it’s a family story. And then this other book came out, and I said that I wanted to option it, so that it would appear in the press, and then people would say, oh, well, somebody’s already doing an LSD story, so I won’t do it,” he explained.
“So my agent said to me, you have to get permission from HBO because you have a deal with them. I went down, saw Casey Bloys and Francesca Orsi, told them what I was planning, and they said, we’ll buy it.”
Chase said that he had never experienced such enthusiasm for a project at the pitching stage, so he decided to split the project across TV and film.
Discussing other future projects, Chase said he would also like to reunite his Not Fade Away (2012) cast, Jack Huston, Will Brill, and Bella Heathcote, for another feature, and he would like to direct a film about Italian Americans returning to their ancestral homeland.
“I’d like to do something about Italian Americans buying property in Italy. They sell these houses in these abandoned towns for nothing, and a lot of Americans are buying these houses and moving there because things in our country are questionable,” Chase said. “I like to do something like that about four Italian American people going back to the old country, and what surprises are in store for them.”
The Karlovy Vary runs until July 11.
